Hawkins Achitecture

Analysis of AIA Membership Discussion on Linked In

I have been following a discussion posted within the AIA group on LinkedIn. The discussion revolves around the value and benefits of AIA membership and whether one should remain a member. This single discussion may have more comments than any other in the group. It started in December or 2010 and was very active for several months and has resurfaced a bit lately. I felt the urge to somehow extrapolate some data from this conversation since it appears to be a hot topic. I hoped to get some type of revelation from this activity; but honestly, I am not sure that has actually occurred. But the following is the summary of my efforts.

The total conversation to date (March 3, 2012) contains 31,819 words. This represents the main bulk of the conversation. It does omit the dates posted, user names and other little tidbits. It was 50 pages worth of conversation after dragging it into Word and omitting those items.

So I decided to take it to wordle.net. (It is a favorite after all) I hoped this would be the easiest way to extrapolate the most important words that were really driving the conversation. These images omit common words like the, a, and , it, etc. The following images represent the results of the “wordle-ing”.

So the top 10 words:

The Top 10 words: LinkedIn AIA membership Discussion (click to enlarge)

As you may have suspected, this is the meat of the discussion. I do find “time” to be an interesting inclusion. “Local” also points to some certain issues.

The top 25:

The top 25 words: LinkedIn AIA membership Discussion (click to enlarge)

This sheds a bit of light? Some useful terms creep in here. Value. Need. Think. Design.

The top 50:

Top 50 words used in discussion about AIA membership on Linked In (click to enlarge)

Some more useful terms in this on. Change. Issues. Involved. Better. Help.

The top 100:

The top 100 words: AIA membership Linked In Discussion (click to enlarge)

This one shows some of the major issues. But it still does not have anything that just jumps off the page as the main crux of the discussion. But it gives an easy way to distill some of the major issues at stake in this conversation.

The top 320: (1% of all the words present)

Top 320 words: LinkedIn AIA membership Discussion (click to enlarge)

This is a long list of words. But is still has value. A streamlined version of the discussion that certainly must include the majority of issues to be revealed. Reading through this list should provide some indication of how the discussion has been developing.

So then I decided to go another route. I used the text in basic Word software and did a few more investigations. I singled out some words to determine the total number of times they were used throughout this discussion. The results are ……

TOTAL WORD COUNT = 31,819

AIA = 602                                             DUES = 118

CHANGE = 52                                        HELP = 42

LOCAL = 87                                            TIME = 125

GIVE = 20                                              VOLUNTEER = 0

PARTICIPATE (any tense) = 30                GET = 163

ME = 1,176                MY = 254                I = 11,557

THEY = 131                THEM = 41             WE = 496

So there it is. What you may ask? I do not really know either. I am not sure that I gained any of the anticipated increased awareness from this quick exercise. I had planned to convert my extrapolated data into a poll to help determine what members desired of their membership to the AIA. But, alas, this investigation did not produce those types of results. I can say with certainty that it reinforces what I already knew; As a group, Architects have many different voices and it is not an easy task to represent those in a unified manner.

–Andrew